A 100-megawatt data center used to be considered massive. Now developers are building gigawatt-scale campuses that cost tens of billions and demand tens of thousands of tradespeople. Here's an inside look at the five largest U.S. data center projects underway in 2026, who's building them, what makes each one uniquely complicated, and why skilled labor has become the real bottleneck.

The best supplier relationships in industrial construction have always run on a simple principle: trust, but verify. The trust was never the problem—the verify was, because for most of the industry's history there was no standardized, visible way to do it. As programs grew across regions and compliance requirements multiplied, ops directors found themselves short not on trust, but on the shared data to back it up. That's the gap SLM was built to close—not to replace the relationship layer, but to finally give it the verify side it's always needed.

Most of the time, the expensive problems in construction ops aren't the obvious ones. They're the costs that are real, recurring, and completely invisible until someone decides to go looking.

Temp labor operations are one of the biggest sources of invisible cost in non-union industrial construction — not because contractors are making bad decisions, but because the systems most teams use to manage contingent labor were never designed to surface what they're spending. Here are five signs your temp labor program is quietly costing you more than it should.